The rantings of a bookaholic over a cup of coffee

Imbeciles attack again….

While stalking my favourite authors on Facebook I came across this post on the Patricia Briggs official page, for those who don’t know the author she writes great series, amongst these is Mercy Thompson. These books are action packed with great characters and fun to read, but most important is that she never publishes crap. I like some books more than others and this by no means reflects the authors writing but merely my personal opinion on that particular book. However, whether or not I like the book because it didn’t go the way I expected, I have never given this author less than a 4 star rating because she doesn’t deserve it. But when I come across these kind of posts I have to rant as to why do imbeciles insist on sharing their stupidity with the rest of us normal people? Please, if you are an imbecile and insist on making use of the internet, please, don’t attempt to leave comments or click on anything that will make your opinion known. We truly don’t care, and if you indeed cannot help yourself there are many worthy causes like donating money for finding a cure for cancer, helping a child receive an education, animal shelters, etc. etc. that you can merely click away without offending anyone. Please try it.

Anger Management and Amazon Reviews . . . First, this is Mike, not Patty, just so any fiery darts can be properly directed. Patty and I have been watching the Amazon Reviews of Night Broken. I know, I know, the conventional wisdom says that authors shouldn’t read reviews. Reviews are for readers, not authors. And, of course, we’re all too familiar with the horror stories of authors blasting readers who dare give a negative review. Still, curiousity killed the cat, and we read reviews.

Overall, things look very good. There’s a lot of positive reviews, and a smattering of negatives. That’s neither surprising nor particularly disturbing — there’s no such thing as a perfect book, and it’s absolutely impossible to write something that pleases everyone. We scan the negatives to look for places where perhaps Patty didn’t communicate her intention clearly. After all, it’s not necessarily a tragedy to anger a reader, but we certainly don’t want to anger them accidentally. . .

No, on the surface it looks good, but there’s sort of an odd trend. The negative reviews are being upvoted by a group of people, while positive reviews are being downvoted. In fact, someone out there must hate this book with the fire of a thousand suns, they’ve taken the time to downvote EVERY SINGLE POSITIVE REVIEW!!! Since there’s over 600 of them, that shows some serious dedication.

I don’t think it’s really hurting us, but we haven’t seen this particular behavior in previous books. Is this a “thing” now, or or we just special?

Be careful on the internets everyone, there’s some strange people out there.